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In order to use the Exchange Online Archiving, you need to meet the requirements below.
1. You must purchase an Exchange Online Archiving subscription for the Exchange Online service included with Microsoft Office 365.
2. Your users’ primary mailboxes must be hosted on on-premises Exchange 2010 Mailbox servers.
3. You will configure a full hybrid deployment using the Hybrid Configuration wizard.
4. Users must use Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 SP2, or Outlook Web App to access the cloud-based archive mailbox.
If you are using a plan which is only Office 365 environment, you are not able to use the Exchange Online Archiving service. After configuring the Exchange Online Archiving, the on-premise user will be able to archive their emails online.

What I find puzzling is that on the Microsoft website is stated "It’s also available as an add-on service for mailboxes that are hosted online." Furthermore it seems that when you purchase Exchange Plan 2 or Office365 E3 EOA is included.

The archive feature for Office 365 cloud user is called In-Place Archive. Please click on the link below to learn the detailed information about it.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979800(v=exchg.150).aspx
According to what you mentioned, you are using the Enterprise E1 plan. So if you enable the In-Place Archive of the user, the total size of user mailbox and archive mailbox will be 25GB. This is deferent than Exchange Plan 2 and Enterprise E3. If you enable In-Place Archive of a user who having the license of Exchange Plan 2 or Enterprise E3, the size of archive mailbox will be unlimited and separate from the user mailbox. For the detailed information about the storage size, please click on the link below to find Archive mailboxes under Storage limits across Office 365 options.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange-online-storage-and-recipient-limits.aspx

thanks this brought us a big step forward. The picture is getting clearer.

There is one issue remaining: we have already 3 users (with E1 Plan) where we are using this so called "In-Place Archive" which looks like a default function without the need for any add-on license. The reason I'm looking into this is that we have users with real big mailboxs (15Gb plus) which we can not archive with "In Place Archive"

So what do we get for this 3 USD (or 2,50 EUR) add-on option called " Exchange Online Archiving"?

Like what I mentioned, Exchange Online Archiving license is available to assign to those mailboxes which are on Exchange server 2010 under a hybrid environment. So if you want to use this add-on service, you need to setup a hybrid environment, un-assign the Exchange Online license from the users and move them to on-premise server.

Thanks,
Yang Yu

Thanks for the feedback.

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forgive me my stubbornness : if you look at the screenshot of the actual Microsoft website you will see the following sentence: “It’s also available as an add-on service for mailboxes that are hosted online”. This seems to be a new option!

On the Germany version it is even more explicit : „Außerdem ist sie als Zusatzdienst für in Exchange Online und Office 365 gehostete Postfächer erhältlich.“ Which you can translate as “Also available as an add-on service for Exchange Online and Office365 hosted mailboxes”

This for me implies that EAO should also be available as an option for Office365 and Exchange Online.

Again I apologize for my persistence and I do appreciate you time and effort however I’m still not 100% convinced by the answer.

After testing and consulting with our senior member, the Exchange Online Archiving service is already add to Office 365 plan which is called In-Place archive. It is not available to add this service to Office 365 user. The reason why the website mentioned “It’s also available as an add-on service for mailboxes that are hosted online” is this service is already included in Office 365 as In-Place archive. And different plan has different size of the archive mailbox.

I still agree with John Putsabove that this is unclear and presented in several places as available now as an add-on to E1 subscriptions, despite Yang Yu's explanation. From what I can see, the new "In-Place Archive" feature appears to be inactive on E1 subscriptions and I've been unable to find a way to activate it. Could this be possible only after buying and assigning EOA licenses? My understanding is that the EOA features that are included in E3 are not included in E1 and would cost extra. If they could be just activated via the (in our case, non-functional) In-Place Archive feature, how could we pay for them?

Thanks for the feedback.

You have posted to a forum that requires a moderator to approve posts before they are publicly available.

we have subscribed 2 x the "Exchange Online Archiving" add-on. The order process accepted our request and the licenses became available. After that we added these add-on licenses, without any error or problem, to E1 Office365 users. What we not could do was use the additional archive storage. Upon which we opened (on July 17, 2013) a support ticket. On request of Microsoft Support we have run some PowerShell scripts. In the output one could see that the archive storage was available. The ticket is currently escalated but alas we are still waiting on a usable answer.

We also tried it with a Kiosk account but there it was not possible to add Exchange Online Archiving (which is correct since it is not available for Kiosk users)

Thanks for the feedback.

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We added EOA to a user and the archive space bumped up to 100Gb. And, according to MSFT, one can call them to increase that, since EOA permits unlimited storage size. What I don't understand is the legal retention feature. What that is, and how that is administered.

Thanks for the feedback.

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What John said is correct. There are actually two add-ons available. Exchange online Archiving for Exchange online users (for O365 hosted mailboxes) and Exchange online archiving for Exchange users (for on-prem hosted mailboxes to archive their emails in cloud). I think John is referring to the first one and Yang is referring to the second add-on.

Also, the In-place Archiving can't be enabled unless you have purchased the EOA for EO add-on. This we found out when we tried to enable the in-place archiving for one of the E1 users without the EOA for EO add on.

At the end of the day, it appears that Microsoft is forcing the customer to buy the add-on if we need any archiving at all for the mailbox.

Regards

RV

Thanks for the feedback.

You have posted to a forum that requires a moderator to approve posts before they are publicly available.